damn i'm really dying. I got an autoimmune disease. My immune system is attacking my hair follicles and thats the reason why i'm losing hair. The diagnosis is that its due to stress. Dunno abt that. Man i hate this.. doc said thank god i went to him before i became bald.... if not it would be hard to treat. Treatment would span a course of 2 to 6 months and oh freak costs loads of $$!!!!

damn! To think i juz learned about autoimmune diseases this morning!

Share a story here with u pple. Dunno if the rest have heard, but it happened in England and it caused quite an uproar over there so Ja should know. But in Singapore most of the newspapers didnt really report it.

It's about this clinical trial gone terribly wrong. My prof told us about it.

There's this trial in England testing a drug for Leukemia or the likes. Some cancer of the blood. 6 trial subjects were injected with the drug. Within minutes of the injection, they were screaming in pain. They felt like their head was exploding and their bodies were burning. In a while, all were comatose. Even now, 2 are still in critical condition. The rest will have to live with permanent disability.

What happened? The drug is an activating antibody of CD2 of our T cells, which means CD2 can be activated even without binding CD58 on the antigen-presenting cells. So the co-stimulatory check is lost.

What this means in layman terms is, they were attempting to stop the proliferation of B cells by using this antibody. But they forgot something. Using this antibody will also activate the T cells, which means they go into overdrive, attacking all our own body cells. Yes autoimmune. Cos usually the CD2 holds a check so our immune system don't attack our own body cells. Something like that. They over-activate the CD2, the immune system will start attacking our own body cells.

The subjects now all suffer from organ damages, mostly irreversible. Most probably will have to be on drugs all their lives.

What is the controversy here is this.

This is a total conceptual error that any good university student can point out to you. But yet somehow the higher level you go the simpler things seem too obscure and u stop noticing them.

And another question is this. The official statement is that the drug never gave such a reaction with animal trials. But according to 'inside info' yea my prof told us that apparently the trials with chimpanzees, a very close relatives of humans, gave a similar reaction but they carried on the trial with humans anyway.

Also, why did they inject all 6 subjects at once? If they had waited just minutes between each injection, 4 or 5 subjects will have been saved the torture of this.

K i know i'm boring u guys. ahaha but anyway i got a milder version of an autoimmune disease. Hope it wont get worse!